Mobile - incorrect brand capitalisation

[Vict81]

Hi there,

Has anyone experienced incorrect capitalisation of their brand on mobile - we've tried lots of different things to correct it, but so far none have worked. Any ideas (issue is only on mobile)?

Thanks

Vic

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Vic,

Where is this occurring when you see it? Is Google perhaps re-writing?

-Andy

[Vict81]

Hi,

So it's how our brand appears on mobile in Google, yes it's looks as though they are, but we're trying to correct it, I guess the question really is why they're re-writing it. Do you know why this might happen? As I mentioned we've tried quite a few things to correct this but none have been successful. One theory was around anchor text people use to link to us - is that likely to be the cause?

Vic

[BlueCorona]

Hi Vic,

Are you experiencing this problem in the way Google shows your website's URL or in the mention of the company name in the title tag shown on the SERP?

Unfortunately, I don't have a definite answer for you as to why Google seems to be re-writing it. Like you mentioned, I would go through your backlinks and see how other websites are linking to you. Likewise, I would make sure your title tags and meta descriptions have your company name capitalized exactly as you want them to be shown. To quickly see a list of all the title tags and meta descriptions on your entire website I recommend running a crawl through Screaming Frog. You can access the software here.

I hope this helps!

[davebuts]

Hi Vic,

Sounds like you are talking about a mobile-specific version of your website and not a responsive website.

I've saw this problem recently and it was because the mobile version of the site was not canonicalized properly to the desktop site.

In this case, the mobile page titles were left blank and Google generated their own by using H1 headings and the URL for branding. When the mobile site was canonicalized correctly, Google quickly started using the same specified titles as the desktop site.

To get this working properly, your desktop website should have something that looks like this:

href="http://m.example.com/page-1">

And your mobile site should have something like this:

This example was taken from Google's Mobile SEO configurations guide.

Check if you have this in place. If not, add it!

The only other time I've seen an issue like this was when the brand name wasn't actually in the page title. Google took what was specified as the WordPress 'Site name' and added that the end of all titles that had no branding.

By what you said, it sounded like you DO have branding in your titles, but if you don't, definitely add it the way want it to appear and don't make Google guess.

Cheers,

David

[Vict81]

Hi,

Thanks for the reaponse, it's the page title in the SERPs, we tried adding company name as we wanted but it's still appearing incorrectly. Will have another look at back links.

Thanks,

Vic

[Vict81]

Hi there,

Thanks for the reply, the site is actually responsive  so I'm not sure it can be that. Also the brand name is all lower case and Google is actually adding capitals at the beginning and in the middle, our URLs are all lower case, we don't have our brand as an H1 though, do you think this might be worth a try?

Any other ideas or things to try are very welcome!

Thanks for your help

Vic

[davebuts]

Hi Vic,

Any chance you could PM me the site? I'm happy to take a look instead of taking a stab in the dark.

Cheers,

David

[davebuts]

Hi Vic,

I've had a look at the site and have the following notes:

When I search for the main keywords in the title, the brand name displays in lowercase as it should.

When i search for the brand name, Google ignores the page title and shows only the brand name and includes capitalized letters.

The other issue here is that it ranks the .com domain instead of the .co.uk domain. I used a UK IP address and Google.co.uk and still got the .com ranking for the brand search.

The reason for this is that there are no hreflang tags in place between the two sites. Are you also seeing this? (I want to make sure it's not just me!)

With the branding change on mobile, the only thing I would try is moving the brand name to the front of the title tag for the homepage. I always include branding at the front of homepage titles because Google tends to re-write them that way. I know that's not the case here with how this site appears on desktop search, but everything else looks fine and I would recommend giving it a try!

I'll be interested to see if that solves the problem.

Cheers,

David

[Vict81]

Hi David,

Thanks for the response we'll discuss trying that!  We actually only have the .com version which is why you're only seeing that version.

Thanks again for your input I will let you know whether that has any effect.

Vic